Known for its hardness, Silicon Carbide is a synthetically produced Crystalline compound of Silicon and Carbon.

 

Silicon Carbide

Silicon Carbide (SIC), often known as carborundum, is a chemical substance. It is essentially a silica and carbon combination. It has the ability to perform high-power switching applications. Silicon Carbide (SiC), also known as carborundum (/krbrndm/), is silicon and carbon-based hard chemical compound. It occurs in nature as the exceedingly uncommon mineral moissanite but has been mass-produced as a powder and crystal for use as an abrasive since 1893. Sintering may glue Silicon Carbide grains together to make exceedingly hard ceramics, which are frequently used in applications requiring great durabilities, such as automotive brakes, clutches, and ceramic plates in bulletproof vests. Large single crystals of Silicon Carbide can be grown by the Lely method and they can be cut into gems known as synthetic moissanite.

Around 1907, Silicon Carbide electronic applications such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and detectors in early radios were exhibited. SiC is a semiconductor material that is utilised in semiconductor electronics devices that operate at high temperatures, high voltages, or both.

Moissanite occurs naturally in minute amounts in some types of meteorites, corundum deposits, and kimberlite. Almost all Silicon Carbide sold worldwide, including moissanite diamonds, is synthetic. Dr. Ferdinand Henri Moissan discovered natural moissanite in 1893 as a minor component of the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona, and the substance was named after him in 1905. Moissan's discovery of naturally occurring SiC was first challenged since his sample might have been tainted by Silicon Carbide saw blades on the market at the time.

Edward Goodrich Acheson is credited with the first large-scale manufacture in 1890. When Acheson cooked a combination of clay (aluminium silicate) and powdered coke (carbon) in an iron bowl, he was aiming to create fake diamonds. He named the blue crystals that formed carborundum, assuming it to be a novel carbon-aluminum combination akin to corundum. Moissan also created SiC by dissolving carbon in molten silicon, melting a combination of calcium carbide and silica, and reducing silica with carbon in an electric furnace.

On February 28, 1893, Acheson patented the process for producing Silicon Carbide powder. Acheson also invented the electric batch furnace, which is still used to create SiC today, and founded the Carborundum Company to produce bulk SiC, initially for use as an abrasive.  In 1900, the firm reached an agreement with the Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company after a judge's order granted its founders "priority broadly" for "reducing ores and other substances using the incandescent process." It is reported that Acheson was attempting to dissolve carbon in molten corundum (alumina) when he found the existence of hard, blue-black crystals that he mistook for a carbon-corundum complex, hence carborundum.  It may be that he named the material "carborundum" by analogy to corundum, which is another very hard substance (9 on the Mohs scale).

SiC was originally used as an abrasive. Then came the electronic applications. Silicon Carbide was utilised as a detector in the earliest radios around the turn of the twentieth century. By applying a voltage to a SiC crystal and witnessing yellow, green, and orange emission at the cathode, Henry Joseph Round created the first LED in 1907. In 1923, O. V. Losev found the effect again in the Soviet Union.